The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Network service providers or customers who use packet voice telephony or voice-over-IP (VoIP) services face challenges in deploying IP phones to end-users. In particular, service providers and customers need to provide an IP phone with a configuration appropriate or correct for each individual user and including a variety of parameters, such as phone numbers and particular feature sets for each phone. For example, an IP phone that is deployed at a reception desk requires an entirely different feature set and configuration than a phone deployed to a conference room. Different individuals also require different phone numbers and/or feature sets depending on the roles of the individuals in an organization or the service package to which the end user subscribes.
In a conventional approach, the process of deploying IP phones has been mostly manual. This approach has required a technician to be physically on site to distribute the phones to each location and to create the correct configuration for each phone. This approach is costly and time-consuming. The approach also is especially challenging when migrating an existing customer (or site) to a VoIP network while preserving the customer's existing phone numbers.
Call control systems are used to manage IP phones in VoIP networks. Commercial examples of call control systems include Cisco Call Manager and Call Manager Express on Cisco IOS® routers, commercially available from Cisco Systems, Inc., San Jose, Calif. A call control system identifies a phone by its Media Access Control (MAC) address, which is an identifier value that is assigned when the phone is manufactured and which is typically never changed. Dynamic IP addressing is typically used in VoIP networks, and call control systems typically include or can access a Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) server for assigning IP addresses.
In this context, when an IP phone boots up, the IP phone obtains an IP address for itself by sending a DHCP request that contains its MAC address to the call control system. The IP phone also requests an initial configuration from the call control system. Upon receiving the initial configuration, the IP phone internally applies the configuration. The IP phone registers with call control with its MAC address and other parameters.
However, the initial configuration typically does not contain all parameter values that are customized or appropriate for a particular individual user. For the IP phone to function properly for a particular user, the correct specific configuration for the IP phone needs to be stored in the call control system in advance, and retrieved and applied to the IP phone. There may be one specific configuration for each MAC address that identifies an IP phone. Therefore, selecting and applying the right configuration requires a way to associate a particular IP phone, as identified by its MAC address, with a particular user. If an individual user can be associated with an individual IP phone, then the right phone numbers and feature sets can be assigned, proper configurations can be built, and each phone can be properly provisioned.
In current practice, identifying a phone to user association generally is a manual process. For instance, a service provider sends a technician on site to physically distribute the phones to each location, and that technician determines associations of MAC addresses to users. This information is sent to the network operations center of the service provider, and proper configurations for each phone are manually generated and electronically provisioned in the call control system at the site through network communication. Associations of users to MAC addresses, phone numbers, feature sets, etc. are established. However, this approach is considered too costly and undesirable because it requires an on-site visit.